New York Diary

Buckleys don't fit the "Bill"; Zuckeman's date in the doghouse; coming to terms with Hillary hate

It was like a scene in a movie," says Christopher Buckley. He and his wife, Lucy, had just walked onto the Forbeses' yacht, The Highlander, on July 4. "Where are your parents?" asked Kip Forbes. "They weren't invited," replied Christopher, the son of Bill and Pat Buckley. Kip insisted they had been— until he noticed the couple boarding and shaking hands with Steve Forbes. A Forbes assistant had called the Bill Buckley who runs Royal Insurance instead of the one who runs the National Review.Bill and Beth

Buckley had a wonderful time at the party, mingling with the likes of Bear Stearns chairman Alan "Ace" Greenberg and his wife, Kathy, Salomon Bros, chief Deryck Maughan, and Sotheby's Robert Woolley. The other Buckleys watched the fireworks from their jetty in Connecticut.

MOOT* TAKES A CHANCE

Mort Zuckerman has just lost his best friend. Stockman, the brown Labrador (named for Reagan budget director David Stockman, the subject of an early journalistic coup at The Atlantic) who had been with Zuckerman for 11 years, died recently. The realtor turned press lord has also been shy a girlfriend of late. Friends report that the departure of Santa Barbara-based Moura Wilson followed what they call "the key incident." At Zuckerman's surprise birthday party in East Hampton, Wilson mysteriously handed out keys to some of the wives of his friends. After dinner, she toasted the birthday boy, alluding to their on-again, off-again relationship: "I'm back! Would the other women who've been letting themselves in while I've been away please give me their keys now." The joke didn't seem to go over well; Ms. Wilson hasn't been seen in the Hamptons since that weekend. Zuckerman's new Labrador is named Chance.

HARTFORD CURRENT

The town house in Murray Hill was appraised at $1.2 million, but the best offer was $900,000. After subtracting a $620,345.49 mortgage, how does the seller get only $50,000—or $4,000 less than the realtor's commission? If the seller is Huntington Hartford, the odd $175,000 is going to back taxes. The A&P heir squandered his $100 million inheritance and in 1992 filed for Chapter 11 to stop the bank from repossessing his home. In the end, the bankruptcy judge had the town house sold; Hartford himself refused to sign the contract, according to court documents, "for personal reasons." The 82-year-old has moved into a downtown hotel while he looks for another home.

AND...

... Lynn Forester, wife of former politician Andrew Stein, invited Wendy Wasserstein, Gloria Steinem, Judy Miller, and a few other "smart women" for lunch in the conference room of her investment bank. Their topic: Why women hate Hillary Clinton. Forester asked her guests to

argue specific positions, but Steinem objected to that "male-proprietary, black-and-white" approach, so the women held a freewheeling discussion instead. "We came to absolutely no consensus about Hillary, which is probably true about all of America," reports Forester.

.. .New York Times writer Alessandra Stanley talked to Time senior editor Stephen Koepp while he and his brother David were writing The Paper, the Ron Howard movie filming in New York, about life at a tabloid. But by the time Marisa Tomei, who is playing a pregnant newspaper writer married to a journalist, was ready to meet her real-life counterpart, Stanley was days away from giving birth (her husband is Times writer Michael Spector). Instead, Tomei hung out with Daily News columnist Amy Pagnozzi. "She certainly looks a lot more like Amy," says the philosophical Stanley.

... Now that Ron Perelman and Elizabeth Saltzman are an almost official couple—she wore a Revlon hat on Good Morning America for her segment on baseball caps—it seems only fair to check in with her ex-husband, financier Glenn Dubin. Dubin is engaged to Dr. Eva Andersson. A former Miss Sweden and Ford model, she's just completed her residency and is now an attending physician in internal medicine at Lenox Hill Hospital.

DEBORAH MITCHELL